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Fw: extinction paper



I've read the paper that finds aberrant amino acid compositions of "reptilian" proteins. Here are the comments I wrote offlist...

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Marjanovic" <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>
To: "Mickey Mortimer" <Mickey_Mortimer111@msn.com>
Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2005 12:36 PM
Subject: Re: extinction paper

Though I didn't care enough to really
think about it, at first glance it seems terrible.

It is terrible. Reptilia (why in italics? PhyloCode -- and then classes -- and then several "phyla" as well as Actinopterygii as classes???) as the sistergroup of "dinosaur", dinosaur extinction as any challenge at all to evolutionary biology (as opposed to physics), reptiles as unique among all animals in being poikilothermic... and the proposed reason for dinosaur extinction

Cold weather, basically!

would have killed off everything except "Reptilia" and _perhaps_
the viviparous animals. Oopsie, and those that brood their eggs -- it
literally goes without saying that no dinosaur ever brooded. Oh, everything
in the water survives! The authors should let a mosasaur bite them.


Plus the general confusion over singular/plural and articles (all of which
are missing in Chinese). I want the heads of the peer-reviewers -- assuming
any exist, but Elsevier should have peer-review -- on a silver plate
[... or platter, right?].


Fig. 1 is interesting, however. Someone should find out what it says.

Fig. 1 (the only illustration) shows the drastic differences in amino acid composition which must have some reason to exist.